The Left is in a horrible huff. Once again James O’Keefe, the conservative film-maker who exposed ACORN, has demonstrated the duplicity of the Left. This time he proved why strict voter ID laws, opposed strongly by the Left, are necessary.

In more than 10 minutes of video footage, which has gone viral on the Internet, O’Keefe demonstrated how easy it was in New Hampshire for an individual to pose as a deceased voter and still receive a ballot to vote in an election.

New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, (R-Mont Vernon) called the video “a shocking exclamation point on the need for immediate reform to New Hampshire’s election laws to ensure that voter fraud does not taint the rights of our citizens to have their votes counted in an honest, responsible way and impact our state.”

New Hampshire Governor John Lynch vetoed legislation passed in 2011 requiring photo ID at the polls. Governor Lynch had stated in his veto message that there was “no voter fraud problem in New Hampshire.”

O’Brien begged to differ. He said the House will pass legislation again this year. “Hopefully, this video will shame the Governor into signing it,” O’Brien remarked.

Leftists are trying to divert attention away from the underlying voter fraud issue, which O’Keefe graphically exposed, by going after the messenger. They want to prosecute O’Keefe and his colleagues for allegedly violating federal and state election laws, even though there is no evidence that the conservative activists actually tried to cast the ballots that they received posing as deceased voters.

The far-left Daily Kos and People for the American Way, for example, are circulating a petition asking for the New Hampshire Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney to “thoroughly investigate the actions of James O’Keefe and his operatives.”

The petition accuses O’Keefe of sending “his own agents out to commit fraud.” It claims that O’Keefe’s reason was that “he wants fewer Americans to vote.”

The truth is that all concerned citizens, including O’Keefe, simply want fewer dead or fictional “voters” to be counted in determining the outcome of elections.

New Hampshire’s House Majority Leader DJ Bettencourt (R-Salem) twittered a response to the calls for O’Keefe’s head. “Fascinating some want to prosecute individuals who had guts to prove our election system had huge hole in it. Didn’t actually illegally vote,” he wrote.

Daily Kos quoted from a TPM interview with Minnesota’s Hamline University adjunct law professor David Schultz, a purported expert on election law, to support its accusations against O’Keefe.

Was it just a coincidence that Schultz happens to be a strident opponent of a photo ID requirement for voters, opposing such a proposal in his own home state of Minnesota? He claimed in his blog that “[V]oter ID is one of the stupid public policies that I often rail about. Its apparent need is grounded in political myth.”

Yet when O’Keefe comes along and demonstrates the need for voter ID to curb election fraud, Schultz tries to make O’Keefe the target. He claimed that there was “no doubt” O’Keefe’s investigators violated a federal law that bans not only the casting of, but the “procurement” of ballots “that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”

Relying just on this isolated snippet of the federal law, Adjunct Professor Schultz concluded:

In either case, if they were intentionally going in and trying to fraudulently obtain a ballot, they violated the law. So right off the bat, what they did violated the law.

The problem with the adjunct professor’s argument is that he ignored the key introductory predicate of the federal statutory prohibition, which applies to persons who

knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by—

(A) the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or

(B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held…” (emphasis added)

O’Keefe and his colleagues never intended to “deprive or defraud” the residents of New Hampshire of “a fair and impartially conducted election process.” To the contrary, they were trying to help improve the integrity of the process by demonstrating a significant flaw. Only if they actually exercised a vote with the ballots they obtained using the names of deceased voters would they have actually undermined a fair and impartially conducted election.

Voter fraud is a real issue. O’Keefe performed a public service in showing how easy it is to commit fraud without an effective voter ID requirement. As usual, the Left will do anything to obfuscate the truth.